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A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Loo in Atlanta by Jina Bacarr

July 11, 2013 by in category Archives tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No girl forgets her first.

As in her first RWA conference. Mine was Atlanta 2006. Ah, yes, I still remember the Harlequin Party at the Ritz Carlton and the meet-up with the OCC crowd. The boxes and boxes of books stacked in conference rooms, waiting to be opened. The great speech Nora Roberts gave that year.

And my hotel room.

The toilet didn’t work. There I was, just off the Atlanta Link shuttle, exhausted from the long flight, bags in my room, shoes off, when I had to wait for maintenance…

And wait…

And…

Like I said, you remember your first.

Hopefully everyone’s loo is in good working order at this year’s national conference once again being held in Atlanta July 17-20th, but I can’t help but chuckle when I look back at my experience at RWA 2006.

Here’s the video I shot of my bathroom saga:

 
Music: Honey Rose from B&H Gold Music www.bhgoldmusic.com
 

 
 
Coming soon:
 
Pepper O’Malley, the heroine in “Naked Sushi,” my October 2013 Cosmo Red-Hot Read from Harlequin, finds herself up to her eyeballs in corporate espionage in a fancy hotel…more about Pepper’s adventures in future posts!
 
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RWA 2012: Dr. Debra Holland: Creating Fighting or Self-Defense Scenes by Jina Bacarr VIDEO

September 11, 2012 by in category Archives tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Have you ever wandered down a dark street late at night, your high heels clicking loudly on the cobblestones, when you hear a second pair of footsteps behind you?

Is someone following you?

Heart thudding in your chest, you stop.

He stops.

Your pulse races…the hair on the back of your neck stands up.

He’s right behind you.

What do you do?

Run or fight?

If you haven’t experienced this scenario, I bet your heroine has.

“From my experience in the field, I know each fight is different and this enemy has his own agenda. Rape? Robbery? Could be, but I doubt it. They don’t operate this way when they want a woman. They act friendly, use pretty talk to pick up a girl, then knock her off her feet before she knows what’s happening to her.

I pull back, walk toward the rue de la Huchette, one step at a time, like all this is happening in slo-mo. As if the whole scene is a video game and someone else is at the controls, pressing the attack buttons and toggling my polygonal form to do what they want and I have no choice. Enemy contact. Kill’em. Kill’em. These words zap through my brain like a subliminal message from command center.

Keep going back. Left foot, right. My eyes scope out the environment. Stone buildings, windows shuttered. No escape. No one to hear the ruckus, the screams. The punks know that. They talk, egging each other on to see who’ll make the first move. Closer, closer they come, like maggots ready to feast on a warm corpse.

Not mine, you punks.”

I wrote from my first-hand experience when I constructed that scene. A similar incident had happened to me on that same street in Paris and I was lucky enough to get away. But I never forgot that fear pulsating through my veins. The icy chill that goes through you when you make that split decision that can determine whether or not you’re going to survive. Pulling up the emotions I felt that night helped me write the emotions of my heroine.

This scene went through my mind when I attended Dr. Debra Holland’s Workshop: Creating Fighting or Self-Defense Scenes at the RWA Anaheim 2012 Conference. Dr. Debra presented an outstanding workshop showing how to protect yourself as a woman and also how to put your heroine through her paces. She gave members from the audience the opportunity to experience what it feels like firsthand to be attacked by a stranger.

Here’s a video I put together from the workshop:

Wild Montana Sky (The Montana Sky Series)Dr. Debra Holland — www.drdebraholland.com — teaches a karate class at the American Martial Arts Academy located at1027 N. Harbor Blvd, Fullerton, CA 714 871-3898.

Check out their website for more information: www.KarateOC.com

AMAA has been teaching Women’s Self-Defense Classes for more than thirty years.

Correction:

The gentlemen from the Academy who assisted Dr. Debra are: Steve Hopple and Adam Rigsby.

A special thank you to fellow OCC/RWA member Rob Preece for his assistance in presenting the workshop.

WILD MONTANA SKY on Amazon

And thank you to Sarah Andre — www.sarahandre.com  — who volunteered to experience her heroine’s fight scene up close and personal.

I highly recommend Dr. Debra Holland’s workshop.

Thank you, Dr. Debra!

Jina
www.JinaBacarr.com


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OCC/RWA in the Raw… Video, that is by Jina Bacarr

July 11, 2012 by in category Archives tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,
Here we are in July and RWA Anaheim is two weeks away. No airports, no shuttles, no time change for OCC members this year. Yay! Whether you’re commuting to the conference or staying at a hotel, I thought it would be fun to bring back the “good old days when…
The plane was late taking off.
Late arriving.
Where the heck is the shuttle?
A cab costs how much?
My God, I’ll never get those three hours back.
Breakfast is at 7:30 a.m. but my watch says 4:30 a.m.
I haven’t slept n three days.
You did what at the _________ (fill in the blanks) party?
Can I have late check out, please? Pretty please?
So as an ode to those days of yore when OCC members didn’t have the RWA conference in their backyard, here is a short video of several of us from OCC at John Wayne Airportback in 2007 waiting to fly out to Dallas. No music, no editing,just OCC in the raw!
Enjoy!
And I’ll see you at the RWA 2012 Conference in Anaheim!
Best,
Jina
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